All of my years of life experiences, study at the university, work as a teacher, and travel (most always third class--as cheap as it comes, yet rife with visual opportunity) has enabled me to come to this point where I can form a plan to create a multi-media presentation of my research. My research involves the study of two cultures, their parallels and distinctions. My end product involves working drawings, small and semi-precious objects to wear and carry, large constructions, initially used as props and ultimately as installations, and documentations (usually video-tape and slides).

My research over the past 40 years has centered upon the Celtic Tribes, and the Native American Tribes. They share many salient characteristics. They were both a pastoral peoples who derived strength of cultural and spiritual continuity by living tightly drawn to the ever-repeating cycles of nature. Their oral tradition, their godheads and myths of creation, the resultant visual imagery, are composed richly of symbols and icons from the natural world. Ultimately, both nations of people lost that precious world.

Sadly, when other invading empires abruptly changed that world around them, their nations began to recede. Peter Berresford Ellis in The Celtic Empire writes how this cathartic change affected the Celts, "Here, today, the inheritors of nearly 3,000 years of unbroken cultural tradition are surviving precariously...These descendants of the ancient Celtic civilization struggle hard to survive and maintain their individuality in these days of increasing cultural uniformity." One glance at an Indian Bingo Hall or Smoke House will confirm that notion for the descendants of the ancient Native American civilization as well.

During the last 25 years, my travel and research has brought me to a variety of locations where I have completed site-specific installations. I have selected Southwestern sites that tend to be in opposition the environs of Wales and Ireland; e.g. in Wales the actual site of Gors Fawr is wet and lush with the Presli Mountains to the north, while on the Carson Mesa it is desert with the mountains to a southerly direction. I have produced drawings, small amulets, and large constructions that give reference to nature's cycles and man's part in the greater schemata. I have written and produced performances that include references to both the ancient Celtic/Druidic tradition and the ancient Native American/Shaman tradition. For enrichment of the fabric of my work, I have relied upon the writings of Dylan Thomas:

" The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of the trees

Is my destroyer

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose

My youth is bent by the same wintry fever..."

And have Chief Seattle:

" My father said to me,

I know the sap those courses through the trees

As I know the blood that flows in my veins.

We are part of the earth and it is part of us.

The perfumed flowers are our sisters."

All of these devises, the drawings, the sculpture, the metallurgy, the spoken word, the ritual performance, all are brought together so that in a brief, valuable and distilled moment I may offer a glimpse of what all of us have given away. William Wordsworth wrote in the l9th century:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

And so it was July 24, 1983, Carson, New Mexico, the evening of the full moon, in the twilight, “the in-between time”…not dark, not light, began the CELTAE. The CELTAE: LLOER ap GORS FAWR,